The Moment of Caravaggio

The Moment of Caravaggio

Fried is one of the great auteurs of art history. Like the films of
Fellini or Almodóvar, his books have a strong brand identity: whatever
he discusses, you always know you are in a certain special zone, a
Friedland. And that is partly because your guide keeps offering you
the exit. My thoughts, he avows, ‘are bound to strike many readers as
going far beyond the bounds of legitimate art-historical
interpretation’. Those readers may well regard ‘the account I have
just put forward as an interpretive fantasy’. Or might they give that
account more credence if they plunged in deeper? He reminds them that
in a trilogy begun in 1980, he approached French painting from Greuze
to Manet in terms of an overarching project ‘which eventually, more
than a hundred years after it got under way, reached a critical
stage’. His analysis of Caravaggio will, he hopes, take this already
long view a stage deeper into the past. He addresses the question of
the co-ordinates that relate painting circa 1600 to what eventually
became modern art proper. He finds some of them in the conditions of
display. From his early cardsharps and pretty boys onwards, Caravaggio
was developing the possibilities of what Fried terms ‘the gallery
picture’: not exactly an item for open exhibition, but one to hang in
a patron’s collection among other painters’ work, competing for
attention.